Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

So how would one go about taking away home ISPs' ability to get away with charging both sides of the connection?

Title 2 reclassification, which the President has proposed, is *exactly* how you do this. Common carriage, a form of title 2 regulation which governs the phone system, among other things mandates that phone infrastructure owners resell service at a reasonable wholesale rate to other phone providers. This is why you can buy phone service from any phone provider - not just the one who owns the cable that comes to your house.

The problem you're articulating - a hugely important problem - is exactly what the President is trying to tackle here. Net neutrality is part of it, but title two reclassification gives the FCC much, much broader powers to keep the eyeball networks (i.e. home broadband providers) in line. It doesn't predetermine what the FCC will do with these powers, but this is the right track.

The courts have essentially said that in the absence of title 2 reclassification, net neutrality won't be possible. But what the President is proposing IS title two regulation. Should the FCC move forward with this (its choice) it should not have an issue in the courts.

vivIsel (450550) writes "Cyan, the company behind Myst, is taking another shot at an game in that vein — this time in a new game universe, with the Unreal 4 engine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they haven't gotten a lot of traction with traditional game publishers, so they are turning to Kickstarter with a $1m total ask. The Kickstarter video also has some neat shots of the Cyan headquarters — which looks a bit like one of the buildings on Myst island itself."

There's already a Federal Datacenter Consolidation Initiative in the works — one that the Government Accountability Office estimates would save $2 billion by 2015 — but agencies have been slow to act. The Bennet-Coburn amendment would set a timeline and require agencies to report back on their progress. Seems like a no-brainer — and for once, both Democrats and Republicans (along with GAO, which has publicly called for legislation along these lines) agree on that."

vivIsel (450550) writes "This morning, President Obama is set to unveil a new executive order that will allow the U.S. to specifically target sanctions against individuals, companies or countries who use technology to enable human rights abuse. Especially as repressive regimes more effectively monitor their dissidents online (rather than simply blocking access), the sanctions focus on companies that help them do that.

President Obama is set to announce the sanctions in a speech at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. — which will be livestreamed starting at 9:45AM EDT."

Tracking showed that 96-percent of the devices were accessed once found, and 70-percent of them were accessed for personal and business related applications and information. Less than half of the people who located the intentionally lost devices attempted to locate the owner. Interestingly enough, only two phones were left unaccounted for, the others were all found.

Going further, of the devices located, 45-percent of them reported that there was an attempt to read corporate email, and the remote admin application was accessed 49-percent of the time. A file named “saved passwords” was also one of the top selections, with a 57-percent access rate. Access to social networking accounts and personal email were each attempted on over 60 percent of the devices.

The numbers shouldn't be surprising. While not everyone has malicious intent, people are curious by nature — so remember to password protect your smartphone."Link to Original Source

vivIsel (450550) writes "Out today from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin are the 2011 County Health Rankings. These rankings are the most detailed ever look at county-level health data, and some of the factors they measure — mortality, morbidity — are what you'd expect. But others are more surprising: motor vehicle crash deaths, excessive drinking, education, air pollution and access to healthy foods.

"The press loves a good villain, and so the story seems to make intuitive sense: the nuke-testing, IBCM-firing, SCUD-launching North Koreans launch a cyberattack in yet another moment of classic brinksmanship to protest the United Nations, US imperialism, ROK aggression, and prove their own might. The progression is obvious. Right? Not really."

Cyberwonk's six reasons why we may have it wrong start with two fundamental problems: cyber attacks, unlike missle launches, don't enhance Kim's standing inside a completely unwired country. And if he wanted to make waves outside his own borders, he would have claimed credit for the attacks — which he didn't."

Submitted
by
Healthily Anonymous
on Wednesday October 15, 2008 @02:09PM

Healthily Anonymous (450550) writes "The Robert Wood Johnson foundation just released a study on education, income and health. And perhaps it isn't too great a surprise that the three are linked.

"Compared with children living with someone who has completed some college, children in households without a high-school graduate were more than four times as likely--and those in households with a high-school graduate twice as likely--to be in suboptimal health."

But one fascinating part of the study isn't in the report at all. It's an interactive "calculator" of sorts produced by the study's authors, which lets users select their area — down to the county level! — and see the average levels of education and mortality. They can then adjust education levels and watch as the number of expected deaths each year changes. If, for example, you increase the levels of education in the Bronx to match those in Manhattan, you could expect a 28% drop in yearly deaths — from 3142 to 2262 per year."

vivIsel (450550) writes "The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has released a study that looks at the links the education and income of a parent and the health of his or her child. The result, according to the LA Times, is this:

"When it comes to children's health, family income matters. So does education."

The study also includes an interactive calculator that lets users modify the levels of education in their area and see what happens to mortality rates. From the article:

"For California, for example, the chart says 61% of adults have some college education and that there are 309 deaths per 100,000 people. If that were to go up by 5 percentage points, there would be 294 deaths per 100,000 people. Factor in the size of California's population, and the difference is significant."